Create and maintain a basic weblog/Activities/Searching for blogs
Because many blogs may not have a large enough readership or ay not be linked to other popular websites, they may not appear in general search results such as Google. So there are a number of techniques we can use to find blogs. With these simple search techniques you will be well on you way to discovering the extensive network of blogs.
Activity
Decide on a topic you would like to find people blogging about. It might be your profession, a hobby you have, news, anything!
OK, you have something in mind? Good! Now we are going to try several different ways to search for what you have in mind. Go through the following methods and just notice the initial results. Don't go too far into the results, just scan what you find and write down the web addresses of the things you think look promising.
- Google's blog search - is simply Google search engine designed to search blogs only. Keep in mind that Google own the blogging platform Blogger, so it may well be that the results bias Blogger blogs.
- Technorati - Technorati is a pretty sophisticated (not just blog) search engine. It will search photos, videos, blogs, wikis you name it. It will even tell you how important it thinks a result is.
- Bloglines - Bloglines is mainly a service that people use to subscribe to blogs. As a result it has a good record of what blogs people are subscribing to.
How did you go? Did you find lots? Too much I bet. As you can probably tell, blog searching is pretty crude. The best thing to do is to use search to find one or two blogs that you think really IS what you're looking for. Open that blog and scan it for links to other blogs. It is a bit of a blogger's ethic to include links to other blogs that they read. You'd be pushing it to find a blogger worth reading who wasn't linking to blogs they read. Most bloggers spend far more time reading blogs than they do writing blogs. Their links will either be in their main menus, or actually in the various posts they have written.
Resources
- Video screen recordings for each of the above
- PDF screen demos for each of the above
- A reading or two
